


les sculpteurs, les marbriers

by Cymbidia



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Artist Grantaire, Canon Era, Gen, Grantaire pivots from Neoclassical Painting to Romantic Sculpture, Humor, Inspired by Pygmalion and Galatea (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Les Amis de l'ABC Shenanigans, M/M, Romantic Grantaire, Romantic Jean Prouvaire, Romanticism, Sculptor Grantaire, Temporary Character Death, Victor Hugo cameo, the Battle of Hernani
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-16
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-18 14:07:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 10,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29491053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cymbidia/pseuds/Cymbidia
Summary: 1824-1832: Grantaire, having developed an allergy to paint thinner, becomes a sculptor.Ostensibly a Pygmalion fusion with Enjolras as Galatea, really just canon era bohemian artist nonsense.Enjolras sighed tolerantly. "As long as the cartridges you cast aren't counterfeit."Grantaire smiled. "Of all the things I cast, cartridges are the only things which are not counterfeit, for they are cartridges themselves and not likenesses of cartridges."Enjolras touched his own cheek, almost unconsciously, and frowned.
Relationships: Bahorel & Jean Prouvaire, Enjolras & Les Amis de l'ABC, Enjolras/Grantaire (Les Misérables), Grantaire & Jean Prouvaire, Grantaire & Les Amis de l'ABC, Les Amis de l'ABC Friendship
Comments: 14
Kudos: 18





	1. March, 1826

**Author's Note:**

> Please forgive any inaccuracies, I'm not a history or art history major - I am always open to historical fact checking!

Giving up the paintbrush hadn’t been easy, but it had been necessary. Grantaire was mildly allergic to several kinds of common pigments, and the smell of paint thinner and linseed oil gave him a splitting migraine. The effects worsened with daily exposure, until he had fainted at the easel one time too many. Thus, he would have to be cruelly parted from his life's work. Gros, who looked after Grantaire at the Beaux-Arts de Paris because Grantaire pere had once aided him with the plunder of Napoleon, maintained that Grantaire's nausea was simply a reflexive sensation instilled by a habit of showing up hungover to classes. Nevertheless, he made all the necessary arrangements for hapless Grantaire to be shuffled off to the tender cares of the newly installed professor David. D'Angers, that was, the sculptor, and not the apparition that haunted Gros in the studio. Though perhaps D'Angers would now be another David aggravating Gros, as Grantaire was not the first student of Gros to win the prix de Rome for painting and then turn to the study of sculpture soon after. Unlike Grantaire, who had won unexpectedly and with difficulty, and was therefore largely written out of people's expectations as a fluke, August-Hyacinthe Debay, the most junior of the sculpting Debays, had a way of grimacing apologetically when Baron Gros cornered him at salons and Salons and made neutral remarks about his sculpture and of how unexpected it all was, when he had won the Grand Prix for painting in '23.

"Sir," Grantaire said earnestly, "I will take what you have taught me to the grave. I shall never have a greater love than neoclassical painting. I will waste away. I will pine. I will never make art again."

Gros rolled his eyes and pointed to the door. "David D'Angers is expecting you. Don't antagonise him too much until you've grown on him a little, the fungus that you are."

Grantaire clutched his breast, wounded. "I always treat my masters with the utmost deference," he protested, tossing his hair emphatically.

"He has newly been made a professor," nagged Gros with saintly patience. "Stouf might have let you get away with your antics when he was doddering on his last legs, but David will not be as lenient as I. I have bribed him to tolerate you in the short term, do not waste my efforts."

"Yes, yes" Grantaire wasn't particularly listening. "Of course mother, whatever you say."

Gros twisted Grantaire's ear. "He has a certain tolerance to Neoclassicism, but he is a quintessential Romantic. You're friends with a bunch of Romantic hooligans aren't you? Take this chance to pivot in school as well as medium. You certainly smoke enough opium to be a Romantic."

Grantaire pouted at this gross mischaracterisation. He did not consume nearly as much opium as Bahorel or Prouvaire. It made him too languid - he preferred to be belligerent and annoying in his intoxication.

"I will endeavour to be my most Bohemian for him," Grantaire promised. "And I will never mention the greater David in his presence. I heard he was jumped in an alley in England, because they mistook him for your shared master. I will pretend to have never heard of Neoclassicism."

Gros massaged the bridge of his nose with a paint-splotched hand, his shoulders hunched like a man of seventy.

"Grantaire," he said wearily. "You are indifferent to other mediums I can teach you, but you do like sculpture, you have told me yourself. You're forever bothering the sculptors and marble workers. The Romantic movement is beginning to shift into new directions, there are niches you may carve out for yourself. If you don't like it, you may return to my studio and I will get you started on something else. If things don't work out, I will personally introduce you to the lucrative business of pornographic etchings.

Grantaire gave Gros a friendly smile. "Twenty-three is a little late to be making a new career," he said lightly. "But thank you, I am glad to have you looking out for my future, _maman_."

Gros snorted. "Give me some credit, I have taught my share of libertine layabouts. Your father is hardly at the end of his patience, and so you are hardly at the end of your career as a student. When you no longer have an allowance, then we will think of your future in earnest. Now go, D'Angers is waiting for you."

Touched despite himself, Grantaire blew Gros a kiss and sauntered out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1)David D'Angers was one of the leading sculptors of his time. Hugo calls him the Michaelangelo of Paris. He and Gros both studied under the painter David, though D'Angers only did so relatively briefly and has other masters that were stronger influences and Gros was a leading successor of David's legacy and his career was haunted by David til the day of his untimely death. the "David" is the surname and "D'Angers" is where he's from - he took it up to distinguish himself from painter David.  
> 2)August-Hyacinthe Debay's father and elder brothers are both sculptors, and after he studied under Gros and won a grand prix de rome for painting, he also pivoted to sculpture. Grantaire winning a prix de rome is more of a heartcanon than a headcanon, but you can pry it from my cold dead fingers. Grantaire wins his hypothetical Prix in 1822, a year without a real grand Prix winner. Debay is a second class winner that year, and takes grand prize in 23. The subject for 22, and I shit you not, was Orestes and Pylades. I picked the year before I found this out, so you can imagine how loud I screamed at the serendipity.  
> 3)The watershed moment for what Romanticism was and will become arrived in 1830 with Hernani, but I feel like there were some small rumblings of things to come by this time. Very early rumblings. Let's just say that in this AU Gros can see into the future.  
> 


	2. 1826-1830

There were not as many apples to be pilfered at the knee of David D'Angers, and a great many more fire hazards. Under Gros, Grantaire had a little experience with engraving in bas relief, though he had mostly worked intaglio, for the pornography Gros did not know Grantaire was already etching for pocket money. The rest was largely foreign to him, though he knew some of the processes in theory, and had dabbled a little in his own time. Eventually, he got used to casting bronze, chiseling marble and mixing up plaster. He even got fairly proficient at minting coins. Grantaire initially quailed at working with molten metals, but soon found himself comfortable handling all the tools of smiths and masons.

The thin layer of flab on his arms disappeared. He developed marvellous aches and strains in muscles he didn't know he had. He learned to keep a steady rhythm with his hammer. His painter's callouses were subsumed by his sculptor's callouses. He developed a mild cough from all the dust he spent his time rasping and polishing metal and stone, but that was wildly preferable to the splitting headache that painting gave him. His figure, once dominated by his athletic pursuits and his love of food and wine, now shifted into something broad and workmannish.

Nevertheless, he missed stealing fruit from his master, and so he often found himself back at Gros' studio, harassing the students and annoying Gros. Signol, who visited Gros and Blondel incessantly in preparation for the Prix de Rome of '30, was of the opinion that Grantaire was simply refusing to be cut from the apron strings, and said so to his face. Grantaire threw a rotting pear at him in response, much to the consternation of the new students languishing in the lowly hell of still lifes.

In between the great upheaval of his professional life, had Grantaire nevertheless found time to consort with suspicious republican types constantly on the verge of being accused of sedition. He even called some of them his friends. His friends now called upon him to mint crude medals that served as tokens of trustworthiness for their various clandestine activities, and Grantaire was so relieved to see the duty of official cartoonist for their pamphlets passed on to Feuilly that he made them with minimal complaint.

In addition to the tokens - an insult to his newly developed skills, really - Grantaire's new outlook on life also produced one more thing for the society, which was a new member.

It was the end of 1829, and the new year was almost upon him. It was a year well spent on productive artistic pursuits, and a year well squandered on women and wine. At the end of the it, Grantaire was elbow deep in his first Great Work. Once a rising painter in his own right, he had been relegated to the drudge work of apprentices and the menial exercises of new students again for some time. Nevertheless, he persevered with ill humour, and found himself with a hunk of marble out of which to excavate something that would win him awards and accolades.

It so happened that Grantaire had an exacting idea of what the statue ought to look like. He had made several miniature clay models as drafts, and each dimension had been perfectly counted and calipered. The beautiful youth would be everything that moved Grantaire about marble and sculpture, every ideal of beauty, every notion of loveliness. He could finally actualise the lovely face that had haunted him all of these years.

Grantaire could cast aside the neoclassical, but he could not cast aside his classics. His work would be lovelier than Helen, more vital than Galatea. A wrathful god, with soft lips and blazing eyes. A god for the new age. Patria's ardent lover, the pure and terrible priest-consort of Marianne. It would be nothing that Grantaire particularly believed in himself, but it would be all that Grantaire found beautiful.

That was, if he could actually execute his vision correctly. It was much harder to unchip marble than it was to dab away a stray streak of oil paint.

New Year's Eve found him drunk at one of Prouvaire and Bahorel's Romantic parties, consuming vast amounts of brandy and complaining loudly to anyone who would listen about his work.

"He must be perfect," said Grantaire, gesturing wildly and almost hitting his captive listener in the head with his cup, which, thankfully, was a glass tumbler rather than a skull. "Perfect. _Perfect_. I must do justice to him. I'm going to perfect the eyelashes, so help me god. And I don't care if it's vulgar, I'm going to paint him like the ancients did. Gilt hair and vermilion lips, plush and disdainful. Glittering blue paste eyes. Exquisite pearly teeth. Do you think I should stick on some hair? Maybe I could get a wig. Marble's nice and all but it's not meant to be touched. I don’t want my touch to stain his lovely face."

Grantaire's listener emitted a noise of discomfort and made another attempt at dislodging Grantaire's grip on his cravat.

"How soft he will look," Grantaire wept, "and how cold to the touch."

"Charles, help!" hissed the man Grantaire was weeping on, "I've been taken hostage."

Another man came to the aid of the foreheady fellow in Grantaire's grasp. This one was also somewhat foreheady, though not as literarily so.

"Good fellow, please release my friend," entreated Charles. "Your Jehan Prouvaire is looking for him."

Grantaire squinted at him. "Are you also a writer then?" He made a noise of disgust, to let the man know what he thought of writers.

"I am a critic," said Charles.

" _Everyone_ is a critic," Grantaire muttered uncharitably, released Monsieur le Vicomte Something Or Other whose name he'd missed upon introduction, and stormed out.

He tottered back to the studio, still quite drunk, and mixed up some paint in promising colours. Then he dropped the palette and threw up. His head pounded abominably, and he was drunk enough that he couldn't tell if he was nauseous from the brandy or the smell of paint. He wavered, fell, and crawled forwards to hide his face against the finely arched feet of his Galatea.

A nearby church rang its bell for midnight, and the clanging echoes pierced Grantaire’s skull like a barrage of grapeshot.

He moaned piteously, grasping at one shapely marble ankle.

"Galatea, Galatea," he whined. "Oh if you would but come to life under my lips. That would show David and Gros!"

He was used to murmuring at his Galatea as he worked, praise and inane chatter and sometimes even secrets meant for those translucent marble ears alone. Now, his head hurt too much for coherent words. Instead, he dragged his lip wetly against the back of a foot, just above the toes. The marble was cold and smooth under his lips, and he could feel every perfect dip and curve of its shape. His fingers rubbed gently across the tense line of the Achilles tendon. Grantaire pressed another kiss to the foot. The stone was warming under his breath. He pressed a kiss to the toes. They were warm. Warm, and almost soft. 

The big toe twitched.

Grantaire yelped in surprise. Before he could scramble up from his prostrate position, a meticulously sculpted foot jerked to life, and kicked him in the nose as it flailed for balance.

Grantaire howled, rolling away and clutching his face.

"What on earth are you doing?" demanded a clear youthful voice. Grantaire peered up through watering eyes.

The lamplight illuminated his Galatea, now every inch as rosy and gold as Grantaire had envisioned him. His eyes were flinty aquamarines rather than cheap paste glass, his hair spun gold rather than gilt paint, his teeth ivory and pearl rather than polished marble. His skin was pale yet flushed, long unblemished stretches of cream and peach. The lashes that Grantaire never got quite right were now two perfect golden fans fluttering with the eyelid. The planes of his face had been refined into something unearthly, the minor flaws of Grantaire’s construction erased into perfect symmetrical beauty.

Grantaire's jaw dropped open.

He screamed like a little girl, then fainted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) Grantaire drawing pornography for spare cash isn't the most well thought out or most intensely researched headcanon but I am entirely too attached to it.  
> 2)Signol wins that grand prix bless him. Amongst the students of Gros I think he's one of my faves to think about interacting with Grantaire.  
> 3)His father was a count, though not a French count, so Hugo was sometimes addressed as a Vicomte as a courtesy title. Charles is Sainte-Beuve. This is before their falling out.


	3. New Year's Eve 1829/New Year's Day, 1830

Someone kicked Grantaire.

"Get up," a voice said.

Grantaire grunted, and curled into a ball. Then he went back to sleep.

"Hey! Citizen Grantaire! Get up!" The voice insisted, kicking harder. Grantaire cracked open an eye. There was a beautiful blond youth standing over him. He closed his eye.

His memories flooded back to him.

He opened his eyes.

"Galatea?" Grantaire rasped timidly.

The youth frowned down at him.

"I am Enjolras," said he.

"An angel rather than a Nereid, of course." Grantaire agreed.

Enjolras crouched down, studying Grantaire with disdain. Grantaire tried not to look at the tender knees, the flexing thighs, and in-between the thighs, the —

Well. Grantaire had carved out every single inch of Enjolras by hand. Averting his gaze hardly erased such intimate knowledge.

"I am not an angel," he said, as if Grantaire was simple. "I am not a Nereid. I was a statue, now I am a man."

Grantaire swallowed down any number of remarks he might have made. "I haven't even made any offerings to Aphrodite yet," he said instead.

"It was not Aphrodite you reached, no," agreed Enjolras. "I am not a little wife for you to marry and knock up. I am wed to France herself, exactly as you intended."

Grantaire made a noise of misery. "Is it too late to change my intentions?" he asked sadly. "I should like to kiss you, at least."

"Yes, it is too late," said Enjolras. "Now go find me some clothes. I want to meet your revolutionary society."

"Er," said Grantaire. He looked around, but found only sheets and drop cloths. Nervously, he found a piece of thick wool cloth being used as a drapery reference, and held it out to Enjolras. “Perhaps a - a toga of some kind,” he said apologetically. “Just until I can find you some proper clothes.”

Enjolras took the proffered cloth and draped it around the key areas of his anatomy. Grantaire bit back a noise of despair. He looked every bit the new godling for the modern age that Grantaire had envisioned.

“Thank you,” Enjolras said politely. “And thank you for, ah, bringing me to life.”

“N-no problem, you’re welcome.” Grantaire averted his gaze awkwardly.

Grantaire rummaged through his things. He was used to keeping clothes at the studio. He had some work clothes, old shirt and trousers and heavy workboots. He offered these apologetically to Enjolras, who put them on with efficiency and practice that seemed uncharacteristic of a newly animated statue. Grantaire repressed a shudder of realisation.

“Here,” Grantaire shrugged off his thick winter coat, and held it out with trembling fingers.

“Thank you,” Enjolras said again, but did not take the coat. “You are kind, Citizen, but I will not take your coat from you. It is the dead of winter.” Instead, he took the piece of thick woollen cloth and wrapped it around himself like a cloak.

“I- if you are certain,” Grantaire said, and put the coat back on. Was he familiar enough with Enjolras to take the liberty of insisting? Likely not. “If you’d like, I have warmer clothes at my lodgings. And tomorrow - or later today, really - I can go out and find you something that fits better. My friend Courfeyrac might -”

Enjolras lit up in delight. “You know Courfeyrac?”

Grantaire floundered. “Er- yes, that is. I do. _You_ know Courfeyrac?”

Enjolras smiled. “He was once one of my most intimate friends. Say, the society you alluded to sometimes - it wouldn’t happen to be a certain society for the advocacy for universal education, would it?”

Grantaire’s jaws dropped open. He stammered incoherently. At last, he regained sentience. “You were not always a statue,” he said, only half questioning.

“No,” Enjolras said, “I wasn’t. I remember it all. My life and my death. I remember you.”

Grantaire looked at the ground. “Ah,” he said, “I am glad to have made an impression, I suppose.”

“Evidently, the impression I made was much greater, if you could recreate my likeness from memory alone.”

Grantaire winced.

“I understand,” Enjolras said kindly. “You saw a young man die, and thought him an apt vessel of symbolism. I don’t begrudge you for working from life. And I am glad that it meant I am able to live again.

“If you know the society,” said Grantaire, “perhaps we might visit some of our friends instead of my lodgings. Prouvaire is of a height with you, and I think perhaps he and Bahorel might provide a better source of sartorial aid.”

“Prouvaire?” Enjolras said in disbelief.

“If you separate the pieces of his outfits,” Grantaire argued weakly. “they might be worn in perfectly boring ways.”

Enjolras shrugged, but conceded. Prouvaire and Bahorel were only friends of his who were both of a height with him and possibly willing to lend him clothes. He wound his woollen cloak tighter around himself, and squared his shoulders.

“Does Prouvaire keep the same lodgings still?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Grantaire.

Enjolras nodded. With a determined set of his mouth and a heroic wrinkle between his brows, he started for the door. Grantaire doused the lamps and followed. He was curious, despite himself, how Romantics might respond to a friend from beyond the grave. Shaking his head, he buttoned up his coat and hurried after Enjolras.


	4. New Year's Day, 1830

Grantaire did not even have to explain himself to the hotel’s doorman. The pair were waved in with nary a second look.

Charles and his writer friend Vicomte something or something was still there, as was the rest of the gathering. Some of them had dropped off into slumber, and others were too inebriated to move. Nevertheless, there was still a respectable throng milling about in Prouvaire’s drawing room, talking loudly about someone’s new volume of poetry.

“He’s back,” hissed the individual upon whom Grantaire had been weeping earlier. “And he’s looking in this direction.”

“Perhaps we ought to go,” Charles suggested to his friend, who gave Grantaire a dirty look and agreed. Before they left, Monsieur Le Vicomte what’shisface took the liberty of picking through the fruit bowl and shoving an unpeeled orange between his teeth for the walk home.

“Ew,” muttered Charles. “Victor, I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

Giving a shrug to Charles and a look of benevolent disdain towards Grantaire, Victor circled around Grantaire and Enjolras and made his escape.

“Who was that?” Enjolras asked, puzzled.

“Er, I’m not quite sure, but I may have accosted him drunkenly earlier in the evening, and, euh, wept upon him a little.”

“That, you ignorant heathen,” said Prouvaire, coming around the corner with a fistful of incense sticks, “was Victor H- Holy God!”

Prouvaire’s incense sticks cascaded out of his nerveless hands. His dreamy eyes were wide with disbelief.

“Bahorel!” Prouvaire bellowed, not blinking. “Bahorel!”

“Jean Prouvaire,” said Enjolras.

“Jehan,” Prouvaire corrected automatically. “That is. Ah. I. _Enjolras_?”

“In the flesh,” answered Enjolras, who then frowned. “Well, perhaps not in the flesh. But it is me nevertheless.”

Bahorel skidded around the corner, an incense holder clutched in one hand, a porcelain statuette of some oriental deity in the other.

“What’s wrong, Prou- _Enjolras_?!”

“It is I,” affirmed Enjolras.

Prouvaire pinched Bahorel, who yelped.

“I must be dreaming,” he said nonetheless, ignoring Bahorel’s protests. “It is. It is the opium. I ought to cut down.”

“You probably should,” Enjolras said, “but I am not an apparition or a figment of your imagination. Rather, I am your fleshly friend, and I have come to see if I might borrow some trousers and perhaps a waistcoat.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1)HE DID THAT. HE ATE ORANGES WITH THE SKINS ON. WHY.


	5. January, 1830

“Grantaire,” said David D’Angers, “where is your statue?”

“Euh, I…It…appears to have been…stolen?”

D’Angers crossed his arms and stared at Grantaire.

“Someone came into this room. Ignored the store of precious metals. Did not so much as touch the works of the studio’s master, or his more established apprentices. And took with them only the amateurish attempt of Monsieur the painter.”

“Yes,” said Grantaire.

“Fine. Perhaps they needed a very large paperweight. Where is the medal you wanted me to critique?”

“Here, professor,” said Grantaire, producing one of the bronze medals he’d cast earlier that day.

D’Angers produced a magnifying glass and began to peer at the medal with a gimlet eye.

“Perhaps it is for the best that you got rid of it, Grantaire,” he said, turning the medal this way and that. “I was beginning to think you’d lose yourself making eyes at a bit of rock and turn into a narcissus flower.”

“I - It’s Pygmalion, not Narcissus,” Grantaire muttered petulantly.

“No,” D’Angers dismissed. “You put too much of yourself in your work. It is not Galatea but Grantaire you see in the rock. You want an inverse reflection of yourself, so that you may love it in lieu of loathing yourself.”

Grantaire winced.

“I- It is only a…I am working from a model, you know. There is nothing of me. It is all him. He is a charming young man, and no foil of mine.”

“You are the foil of him, then. The obverse.” D’Angers flipped the coin to demonstrate.

Grantaire caught the coin and pointed at the portrait on it.

“The nose isn’t quite right,” said Grantaire. “I never get the nose right. The nostril lacks dimension.”

“Hmm, yes, it does,” agreed D’Angers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1)D'Angers was a medallist (someone who made medals, not an olympic medallist lmao) in addition to the more widely conceived kinds of sculpture.  
> 2)Translations into English place Grantaire as being Enjolras' inverse or reverse or obverse or foil or whatever, but there is also a hilarious meta that I can't find rn of how the phrase can also be translated as Grantaire being Enjolras' backside. I have settled for obverse, for the obvious reasons of coins and medallions.


	6. February, 1830

It was astonishing, what the well worn grooves of habit might achieve in an otherwise irregular situation.

Enjolras took up residence with Prouvaire, who had the most spare room. He wrote to his uncle, and told some vague fibs that got back his allowance and effects. He enrolled himself disinterestedly as a law student, but attended fewer classes than Bahorel. He returned to the society of the friends of the ABC, and all their number drifted into his orbit without pause. For all intents and purposes, he returned to life. Grantaire, his resurrector, was treated with bemusement and a strange and warmly tolerant disdain.

Grantaire, sceptic and unbeliever that he was, found himself compelled into attending the meetings with religious regularity, to witness the loveliness and liveliness of Enjolras. He also never again touched marble. Alabaster was tolerable enough, and there was always plaster. Anyway, he hardly needed to limit himself to hunks of rock. Bronze was dramatic, and clay was much less costly. Perhaps if he put a peg on his nose when he was in the studio, Gros would take him back. Perhaps he could turn to watercolours or pastels. Perhaps he would find critical acclaim with ink drawings. Perhaps he would abandon his apprenticeship and make pornography full time for a living. Perhaps he would study at the knee of Prouvaire and become a poet. Perhaps he would run away to England.

Whatever the case, Grantaire was a little frightened of the works of his hands.

"Perhaps," Grantaire confided to the agate cameo of Prouvaire's friend Gérard which he was polishing, "I will go home and turn the family château into an absinthe factory."

Good Gérard did not reply, but remained staring forwards in profile, his nose gratifyingly accurate to life. The likeness was questionable in other ways, but at least the nose was correct, and so was the burgeoning tragedy of his hairline.

"Hmm," said Grantaire, and decided that Gérard was about as handsome as he would ever get. He wrapped it up in a handkerchief and dropped it into a pocket. Then he wiped off his hands and put) on his coat.

The walk to the Musain wasn't precisely a long one, but it was long enough to allow the cold to permeate his entire being. His nose froze into a point of ice, and it's crystals began to creep across his face and down his trachea. The grey slush of late winter could not permeate his boots, yet managed to leech out all feelings in his toes nonetheless.

He burst into the Musain, huffing in relief at the blast of warmth to the face as he crossed the threshold. He stomped his boots to remove the worst of the mud, and scampered off towards the back room before Louison could scold him for the bootprints.

"I am come," he announced triumphantly, sauntering into the room. He held the handkerchief bundle aloft, then slammed it - very gently - on the table before Prouvaire. "Your commission, good M'sieur." Grantaire bowed obsequiously.

Prouvaire, startled and frozen with a bit of pastry half way to his mouth, laughed, and began to free the cameo of its humble wrappings.

"Thank you, maestro," he said in delight.

"I hope it's on time," Grantaire added, sitting down and helping himself to the wine.

"Oh! It is. His birthday isn't until May. I only thought to... Ah. Grantaire, what a striking likeness! What a noble nose!"

Grantaire gathered that Prouvaire had assumed he'd forget about the commission, or dawdle abominably, and thus had gotten the order in early. He shrugged, unoffended.

"Don't expect any more cameos out of me," he said. "It is too limiting. My genius is being stifled by the biological formation of sardonyx and the geological formations of banded agate. Unconscionable."

"What, ho, Pygmalion, shall you return to working your foul witchcrafts upon marble?" said Bahorel from behind what appeared to be an actor's script for a play titled _Hernani_.

"No marble for me, thanks," Grantaire put his feet up on a spare chair and took a gulp of wine. "One angel is enough for me to worship. I have been giving the coins and medallions another go. People are forever wanting plaques and medals to commemorate this and that. I'd wager smiths make a more consistent living than marble masons."

"How virtuous of you," Enjolras said drily, having come over to greet Grantaire, "to give up the ivory tower of the academy and to ennoble yourself with honest labour. I hope your coins are only art, and not unnaturally accurate counterfeits of Charles X. We hardly need any more of _him_ around, to say nothing of the economic harm."

Grantaire took his feet off the chair, sat up properly, and beamed at Enjolras.

"If your new Republic comes, I shall volunteer for duty as chief minter and chief counterfeiter alike," said Grantaire, "for private property is an injustice, and metal coinage doubly so. Oh, that the flesh of a thousand gleaming sculptures should instead be carved and portioned out in support of economic injustice! Enjolras, I know you are marble, but have a care for the plight of your bronzed brethren."

Enjolras sighed tolerantly."As long as the cartridges you cast aren't counterfeit."

Grantaire smiled. "Of all the things I cast, cartridges are the only things which are not counterfeit, for they are cartridges themselves and not likenesses of cartridges."

Enjolras touched his own cheek, almost unconsciously, and frowned. He corrected this moment of weakness with a sour look towards Grantaire, then scuttled off back to his own seat at a different table, where he began to scowl prettily at his dinner.

"He eats," observed Bahorel.

"He scowls," observed Prouvaire.

"He spatters his coffee on his seditious pamphlets," observed Grantaire.

Prouvaire set down fifty francs on the table. "For your troubles, Maestro," he said. "Say, will you accept another commission? My friend Jehan's birthday is quite soon after Gérard's, and almost immediately after that is Petrus."

"You never commission anything for my birthday," Bahorel noted forlornly.

Prouvaire gave him a cutting look.

"Jehan is a sculptor. Please dazzle him with your best work." Prouvaire scowled into the distance. "We share a passion for the medieval, as you may have guessed from his name."

"He'll never let you join that little cénacle he's running out of his studio if you keep antagonising him over stealing your name." Bahorel offered Prouvaire one of his petits fours, and shrugged when Prouvaire waved it off ungratefully.

"I do not want to join his little cénacle," Prouvaire insisted. "I have my own cénacle in this very room, and it is far more vital and inspirational than a group of pretentious bourgeois artistics with nothing better to do that deriding Delaroche or Delavigne and calling that subversive."

"Prouvaire," Grantaire said tenderly, setting up a cube if sugar over his glass of absinthe, " _you_ are a pretentious bourgeois artistic. You deride Delaroche and Delavigne both."

"At least I do not alter my family name for the sake of sounding more interesting."

"You- you did change your name to Jehan," Bahorel said, conciliatory.

Jehan gave a gentle, rumbling growl.

"I've seen his work," Grantaire said hastily. "The pretty fellow who wears the medieval doublet, isn't he? Difficult to miss in a crowd, even at that bastion of eccentrics of the Beaux-Arts. He's of the class Cortot took up after Dupaty, and he also studied with Bosio, I think. He is a far better sculptor than me. I don't think my work would impress him, unless maybe you marched Enjolras to him at gunpoint and made a gift of _him_ , and that would perhaps violate your belief in personal freedom."

Prouvaire shrugged. "You don't have to be better than him at everything. Just... Something impressive, or I will have to write him a _poem_. I don't want to write him a poem."

"Maybe you could compose a flute aria in his honour," Bahorel offered, nose buried back in his script.

"You could give him the name of your tailor," suggested Grantaire. "His slashed velvet doublets do not have half the panache of yours."

"We share the same tailor!" roared Prouvaire, his soft voice breaking as it was unused to being raised. He collapsed dramatically upon Bahorel, almost crushing the script in Bahorel’s hand.

"Never mind that man," Bahorel said soothingly. "I know something that will cheer you up. There is going to be a riot at the Comédie-Française two Thursdays hence. Victor Hugo has really outdone himself this time. Théo is inviting us to go and fistfight the stuffy old traditionalists."

Prouvaire's boyish cheeks flushed rosy pink with excitement. "I don't care for that monarchist at all," he said in false protest. "I barely tolerate him at his own parties, let alone when he accidentally appears at mine. I'm not going."

"I heard he's amassing a Romantic Army to overthrow the hidebound gerontocracy of Classicism." Grantaire lolled back in his seat, shaking the last droplets of his cup of absinthe into his mouth. Smacking his lips, he added, "Alix was telling everyone about it at the studio."

"You love a good riot," Bahorel invited solicitously.

" _You_ love a good riot," corrected Prouvaire. "Still... There is something to be said about defending Romanticism. And I." He hesitated, and said, softly, "I do have a broadsword."

Bahorel clapped him on the shoulder and laughed uproariously.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1)Gerard de Nerval, upon whom Prouvaire was partly based. The poetry, of course, but also the name "Prouvaire" comes from de Nerval getting arrested for looking Too Sus near the Rue des Prouvaires when a legitimist plot against Louis Philippe occurred there.  
> 2)Cameos are, in the traditional definition, pale figures on a dark background, carved from shell or (semi)precious stone like sardonyx or agate that naturally have the layers of colours required.  
> 3)Jehan Du Seigneur, a sculptor, upon whom Prouvaire was also partly based (the name and the medieval stuff and the ugly outfits and the shyness). If Victor Hugo exists in the text of Les Mis then I am merely extrapolating when I assert that Jehan du Seigneur and Jehan Prouvaire exist in similar circles and have a petty oneupsmanship over the outfits and the name and the whole hipstery Medieval Affectations. Sculptor!Grantaire was partly inspired by Du Seigneur.  
> 5)Theophile Gautier, yet another Romantic  
> 6)Victor Hugo, at this point in time, is still a Monarchist, boo.


	7. 25th February, 1830

When Grantaire flounced into Prouvaire's rooms, Bahorel was already inside. He and Prouvaire were armed in their favourite theatre costumes - a fashionable and modern ensemble for Bahorel, a hideous medieval eyesore of silk, velvet, and taffeta for Prouvaire, plus a thick layer of questionable white face powder that made him look floury rather than Romantically consumptive. 

Grantaire had scrubbed up somewhat, but not as much as he otherwise might have, if he was going with a girl he wanted to ingratiate himself with. He brandished his favourite fighting cane.

"Hark!" he declared. "Art thou prepared to lay thy life down for the sake of Art?"

"Not particularly," said Bahorel. "Unless you are including our Galatea in that count."

Prouvaire made a wounded noise and brandished his own at Bahorel.

"How dare you take so lightly the matter of Artistic progress? En garde!" the gentle poet cried, and rained several feather soft swishes of the cane in the vague vicinity of Bahorel's shadow.

Bahorel merely held his hands up and sued for mercy.

"Let us not descend into civil war before we have even met with our enemy," Bahorel pleaded with a smile and a flick of his handsome mustache.

Prouvaire gave him a contemptuous hiss and a stifled giggle, but chose mercy.

"Oh blast it!"

The cry came from within the second bedroom. Enjolras emerged from its doorway, a mass of curl papers on his lovely blond head.

"Jehan Prouvaire," he said plaintively. "I don't see why I must curl my hair. It is the style of the dandy, not of the corpulent Romantic. Oh, Grantaire. Hello."

Grantaire hadn't bothered with doing his own curls, but he might have had he known Enjolras would be in their party.

"Hello Enjolras. May I?" Grantaire descended upon the knotted tangle that Enjolras had made of one of the curled segments, and unravelled it with the ease of long practice.

"Ouch! Thank you." Enjolras tugged on the springy curl in relief.

"Perhaps you will permit me to help you with rest as well," suggested Grantaire. 

Enjolras ran the tips of his fingers over the numerous protrusions upon his head and sighed in aggravation.

"Please."

Prouvaire and Bahorel were having a whispered conversation. Grantaire was vaguely aware of Prouvaire producing the biggest, featheriest, ugliest hat that Grantaire had ever laid eyes on, but he was rather too absorbed in his hairdressing to comment.

He smoothed out the ringlets that Enjolras had already freed, arranging their fall and brushing out the frizzed and knotted parts that had been caught up in Enjolras' impatience. Then he made quick work of the remaining papers. His deft artist's hands moved feather-light over the hair. He wanted badly to comb his fingers through the soft hair, but did not dare, as that would quite ruin the neat ringlets.

When Grantaire finished rearranging Enjolras just so, Prouvaire descended upon hapless Enjolras with the huge ugly hat, and ruined Grantaire's handiwork as he crowned Enjolras with the hideous thing.

Enjolras sighed. "Must I?"

"Yes," Prouvaire said sternly. "You are too sober, in your gray coat and gray cravat. If I do not embellish you a little, you might be taken for a member of the enemy forces, and be caught by friendly fire."

Bahorel stifled a snicker, and gave Enjolras an encouraging nod.

Enjolras sighed again, but did not protest. He was indifferent to his clothes, except that they did not hinder his movements and permitted him to move through his day to day life unaccosted and unmolested.

With all members of the party suitably outfitted, the each seized up their canes and their cloaks. Enjolras was draped with a red and white fur mantle courtesy of Prouvaire. 

Prouvaire himself was a resplendent eyesore in a magenta velvet cloak with white silk lining, providing a lovely contrast with his favourite orange and purple slashed doublet and the emerald of his cravat. His trousers, a cheerful yellow, peeked out coquettishly now and again beneath the many layers. His broadsword was concealed under the whole mess somewhere, though Grantaire had no idea if Prouvaire could actually use it. 

Bahorel was impeccable in deep emerald velvet and silk, daring but not too outrageous, and attempted to keep Grantaire in-between himself and the two eyesores at all times. 

Grantaire was the most pedestrian, in a dark blue woollen cloak to match his dark blue suit, complete with sapphire cravat and a sky-blue silk lining on both the cape and his frock. He had gone to the effort of wearing an everyday coat rather than his good theatregoing coat, on account of the wider range of motion in the arms. Grantaire wasn't particularly interested in the play - modern theatre as an artform held few attractions for him except the attractive performers - but he had agreed to put in an appearance because of the promised brawl. He gathered that Enjolras had either been pressganged or had volunteered to come also because of the possibility of a good fistfight - while Enjolras was not the type to relish a riot for its own sake, he was savage in both canne de combat and savate, and could be depended upon to break a few noses for the sake of his friends.

Primped to Prouvaire's satisfaction, the group sauntered ostentatiously towards the Salle Richelieu. It was only a walk of some twenty minutes from Prouvaire's flat, though they had to cross the river to reach the Palais Royal. The tailored cloaks were not in too much danger of stained hems, but Enjolras had to carry the train of his mantle in his arms to avoid irreparably ruining the white ermine.

"Why do you even have an ermine mantle?" Enjolras demanded in exasperation. "Such a princely garment, for a republican."

"I inherited it," said Prouvaire. "From...oh, some uncle or cousin however-many-times removed whose father was guillotined for wearing an ermine mantle. I prize it for its revolutionary past."

Enjolras stared at the mass of fur and velvet in his arms, intent.

"If it helps," Prouvaire added considerately, "he wasn't wearing it when he was guillotined. Or arrested. And he definitely deserved it."

Enjolras raised an eyebrow, but kept silent, as the streets of the city were not exactly the best place to have a thoughtful discussion about guillotining aristos.

The four of them arrived quickly enough, though Prouvaire refused to allow Enjolras to leave his mantle at the coat check, and likewise kept hold of his own extravagant cloak.

"I cannot wait," Prouvaire said, rubbing his hands together.

"It has been some time since my last émeute," Enjolras said thoughtfully. "It was good of you to bring me, I could do with some low stakes rehearsal."

Prouvaire made a noise of anguish at this blatant disregard for the Romantic Cause.


	8. 6th June, 1824

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for offscreen temporary character death.

The first time Grantaire saw Enjolras, he was bleeding.

A golden haired youth, flushed with exertion, burst suddenly into Grantaire's cramped studio. The large windows had been left unshuttered to let in the waning afternoon sun. The young man scrambled through them swiftly and fell in a heap under the windowsill, clutching at a wound on his thigh. Grantaire startled, and added an inopportune gash of ochre to his next masterpiece, almost ready for the Salon. He cursed and wiped up the streak of paint with his thumb, smudging it horribly.

The young man wheezed, and so Grantaire gave up trying to find a clean corner of his shirt cuff with which to dab at the paint and approached his prone figure with caution.

"Well Monsieur? Who might you be? Surely you are on the run - from the gendarmes, I'd guess."

"Y-yes," the young man gasped. He was more of a boy, really. He could not have been more than seventeen. "My name is Antoine. If you would be so kind as to permit me the use of your-"

The porter of the building let out a distant, muffled shout of outrage somewhere downstairs.

Antoine cursed, and grasped Grantaire by the hands.

"Citizen," he said in a low voice. "I ask your aid not for my own sake, but for the sake of the Republic."

"I'm no Montagnard," Grantaire said, snatching his hands back quickly and smearing ochre paint all over Enjolras' hands and blood all over his own. "In fact, I prefer not to take sides."

A pained look overtook the youth's finely wrought features. Grantaire's heart gave a pang of remorse. A face like that! The Orestes that had won Grantaire his Prix de Rome had not a thousandth of his Grecian beauty.

"But I will help you if I can," Grantaire said, despite himself. "I do not myself desire le Désiré."

Antoine smiled in relief, though his eyes remained tight with fear.

"Thank you, Citizen."

Antoine produced from his inner pockets a crumpled letter. "Take this to the Elephant of the Bastille when it is safe. Pretend to drop it in front of the left foreleg between noon and sunset. Someone wearing a green cap will be waiting for it. Burn it if it is in danger of being seized. If you cannot deliver it by the end of this month, burn it. If you are questioned by my pursuers, conceal its existence at all cost. Point them after me. Throw off suspicion."

"I will see it done," Grantaire promised firmly.

The porter's shouting ceased into faint protestations, and the heavy tread of several men started up the stairs. Antoine climbed onto the windowsill, hauled himself upwards by the rain gutters, and sprinted off across the rooftops. Grantaire shoved the letter under a loose floorboard he had never before found use for. He resumed his seat at the easel and began to dab at the unsightly streak of ochre just as several gendarmes burst into his room.

"Where is he?" bellowed the first man in.

"I- I don't know sir," Grantaire stammered." I- if you mean the blond rascal who climbed in through my window, that is I- I tussled with him and threatened him away with a prop sword. He- who was he? He made me ruin a painting, see, look, and it was almost ready for exhibition at the Salon! I need my best showing to follow up on my Grand Prix win, and now this! Le Gros is going to murder me."

The gendarmes tisked with impatience, but the assurance that he was a somewhat known artist with famous connections removed much of the threat from their demeanor.

"Which way did he go, for god's sake?" The leader of these men prodded forcefully.

"I- I'm not sure, sir, I think he might have climbed up onto the roof, only I heard a loud thud straight after, so perhaps he went down into the back alley behind the building." Grantaire scratched at his nose, a habitual tell of his, and grimaced as he smeared paint on his nose. The turpentine and oil smell of it burned his nostrils.

"Thank you for your cooperation, Monsieur. You two, search the alley behind this house. You two, up onto the rooftop. Report back here once you have found him."

"Yes sir," chorused the other gendarmes, and set off heaving themselves up through the window or clattering down the stairs.

Their leader, who remained, eyed Grantaire suspiciously.

"Your name and occupation, Monsieur?"

"My name is Louis-Jean-François Léon Grantaire," Grantaire answered, stalling. "I am a student of painting. A- a painter, I suppose I can call myself, but I am not sure that would be the degree of exactitude I would feel confident giving an officer of the law such as yourself. That is, I have mostly completed my studies of painting at the Beaux-arts, but I am still a long ways off from leaving my master's nest. But I have a little fame for myself, having won a Grand Prix in painting in 22 for my humble Orestes and Pylades - perhaps you have seen it, Monsieur? It was at the Salon that year - and occasionally do take personal commissions of my own, though I haven't my own studio. Well, we are in my own studio, but I haven't my own practice, so to speak. I only come here to work on my own serious pieces - see here this piece that I was working on when that man came in - several hours of work quite ruined, and almost ready for exhibition! I was hoping to finish the last changes that my master -"

The policeman coughed impatiently. Grantaire flinched dramatically and fell silent, staring at him with huge anxious eyes.

"Describe for me your encounter, please. Spare no detail, the security of the nation may depend on it."

Grantaire stuck his chest out in an approximation of patriotic pride.

"I was painting when he came in, see I was touching up some parts of the painting I wasn't satisfied with - the teeth and lips, sir, their expression did not have quite the nuance I had hoped for - I'm no overwrought Romantic of course, but there is a difference between neoclassical dignity and a poker face! So I have been working on this section all afternoon, sir, when he came bursting in! Look at this streak of paint, I was so startled that I ruined-"

A whistle sounded somewhere up on the rooftops, not very far in the distance. The gendarme's face changed, and he rushed to the window. Grantaire followed anxiously, and the two men searched the skyline futilely for a hint of blond hair. After some minutes, a gunshot sounded. A shout of alarm. Then, silence.

The captain of the gendarmes retracted his head indoors, and Grantaire reluctantly followed.

"Do you think they got him, sir?" Grantaire asked, trembling.

A burst of whistles, some long and some short, pierced the air. The captain listened with an intent air, and nodded at Grantaire.

"Yes, he will not be troubling you any more, Monsieur."

"He is— dead?"

The gendarme wrinkled his brow. "Yes, quite. I am needed at the scene. Please remain here, someone will continue questioning you shortly."

Grantaire collapsed upon the stool in front of his easel, and buried his face in his hands. He was encased in the scent of copper and turpentine. The captain thundered down the stairs and out the door. The next day, the papers boasted of a plot foiled against the king, with the final perpetrator caught and executed during an exciting rooftop chase in the Latin Quarter. The day after that, Grantaire went to the Bastille elephant.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) the Salon as in le Salon de peinture et de sculpture, which theoretically takes place every other year, but sometimes might be delayed a year or two. In Grantaire's professional artistic lifetime they occurred in 22, 24, 27, and 31. Louis-Philippe changed it so that it occurs every year after 1831, but the salon of 1832 was cancelled because of cholera, and anyway Grantaire was dead in canon by then (If my rough research is correct, they generally start in August).  
> 2)Louis XVIII style himself as "the desired"  
> 
> 
> Note: I made a brief change to chapter one to a small tidbit that is mentioned again in this chapter - I've retconned it so Grantaire wins the first place in the prix de rome for painting, not the second place. The reason I changed this is a bit convoluted but, basically, I came up with the headcanon of Grantaire with a prix de rome in [another fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29057760), where he wins first place, and I picked 1822 because it is a year without a real life first class winner that also fits the timeline. I changed that headcanon to a second place for this fic but maintained the year of 1822, and when I did some more research on the prix de rome for 1822 I discovered that the theme for the competition that year was, and get this, _Orestes and Pylades_. The sheer Hugolian coincidence of it all is too much for me, nothing will ever convince me he wasn't fated to win that year. Another Hugolian coincidence is that I researched what David D'Angers was doing in 1822 and the first result that came up was a medallion of Victor Hugo. I am convinced that we all live in a simulation and Victor Hugo slipped bribes to the supreme central supercomputer to bully me personally.


	9. 7th-10th June, 1824

The plaster of the Bastille elephant was beginning to deteriorate. No monument meant to last should be made of plaster. So much for Napoleon. Grantaire studied the beast with a critical eye. 

He found an out of the way spot, and made a show of sketching the elephant for a while. He kept an eye out for men in green caps - it was not the most common of colours. There were one or two loitering about. Grantaire made himself comfortable sketching, and watched as the green capped loiterers disappeared and were replaced with others wearing the same caps. It appeared that whatever organisation the mysterious Antoine belonged to, they had more members than they did green caps.

Grantaire packed up his things, and went home.

Three days later, he dressed in his best suit and paid a visit to Floréal, a grisette who was known to tolerate him on occasion. She did much of her sewing work in her own rooms, which were as bright and airy as Grantaire's studio, and therefore could generally be found at home during the day.

The rent was not cheap, but Grantaire paid it gladly. She had a bedroom and a sitting room, both of which were outfitted with unusually large windows that gave astonishing natural light. Floréal added to the brightness of the architecture with a number of mirrors in the sitting room, arranged just so to maximise lamplight. An amateur watercolorist, she mostly painted when it was too dark to sew. Grantaire supposed that he ought the have insisted that he keep her so she did not have to sew at all, but she was not that kind of mistress, and he was not that kind of student. For one thing, she disdained his neoclassical lineage, and considered herself of the school of Romantics. For another, she was already easing off the sewing, after her watercolours began to sell sporadically.

Grantaire arrived with his canvas and set it upon a spare easel in the sitting room.

"Hello, Grantaire." Floréal looked up from the shirtsleeve she was stitching, but her needle kept moving.

Grantaire took off his hat and went to her, giving her a kiss upon her carefully coiffed curls. He murmured softly into her ear, "I can't stay, I must go off to war."

Floréal stilled. She gave him a questioning look.

"I need to get changed." His panache deflated beneath her gaze. He hurried into the bedroom, where she kept a spare set of clothes of his in the closet, including an old coat with a permanent stain on one lapel. He helped himself to a mousy brown wig and a dusty chartreuse man's hat that Floréal used on occasion when crossdressing for mysterious clandestine Republican and/or Romantic purposes. Grantaire did not know if it was too obvious, but he did not want to chance his delivery being missed or intercepted because Antoine's fellows did not know who to watch for.

Floréal watched him from the doorway, her arms crossed.

"And what war might you be going off to, dressed like that?"

Grantaire prodded at the wig in front of her small mirror, and decided that it seemed natural enough.

"I go to fight for your one true love, Floréal, don't frown so."

Floréal made a doubtful noise.

"Hush, Grantaire rises to the occasion sometimes. Can you check if there are any policemen or spies loitering around here? I can't afford to be tailed.

"I hope you know what you're doing, Grantaire," she said bluntly, but seemed pleased with him, for once.

She took the pretense of emptying out the jug she used to rinse her brushes to poke out the window and and search the streets.

"I didn't spot anyone suspicious, but that doesn't mean anything."

"Not to worry," Grantaire said blithely, and let himself out from the bedroom window, which looked upon a narrow back alley. Floréal suppressed a noise of outrage and flashed him a rude gesture.

Grantaire jogged off, taking the back roads and all kinds of little known shortcuts. He ducked into a paint shop and let himself out the back door. He sauntered into a café and exchanged coats with a drunken fellow he recognised, then left in a crowd of rowdy students. He bought a flower from a flowerseller, the last of this year's roses. When he finally arrived, he knocked on the door of an acquaintance he sometimes slept with, who was known to have Republican leanings.

When Bahorel answered the door, he was clearly not in the mood for a dalliance. However, he took one look at Grantaire's wig and cap, and let him in.

Grantaire gave him the flower. "Will you go on a romantic stroll with me?" He asked shortly.

Bahorel frowned. "I have - I have some business I need to attend to."

"Business?" Grantaire rolled his eyes. "You aren't going to classes, are you?"

Bahorel shuddered. "No," he said firmly.

"Look," said Grantaire. "I just need you to take a quick walk with me to the Place de la Bastille, maybe duck into a back alley to kiss a bit. Throw off any gendarmes that might be tailing me, make them think I've been acting suspiciously and trying to throw them off my trail all morning because I'm a sodomite, not because I'm doing anything suspicious. That's all."

"Why do you need to go to the Place de la Bastille?" Bahorel had a strange look upon his face.

"I- have some business. Republican business, as it happens, so I hope you'll help me."

Bahorel hummed thoughtfully, looking Grantaire over.

"Alright."

Bahorel, also dressed in a suspiciously plain outfit, jammed on his least flamboyant tophat, and walked arm in arm with Grantaire to the Place de la Bastille. It was a walk of some twenty minutes, and they extended their journey with a few stops in dark alleyways, where they pantomimed passionate kissing and kept an eye out for tails. Bahorel was as familiar with the city as Grantaire was, and vastly more practiced at evading the police. The pair of them arrived at the Bastille elephant, and Bahorel kept a careful watch on Grantaire as Grantaire led him by the arm to the front left leg of the elephant, in front of which stood a young man in a green cap.

Grantaire reached into the pocket of his trousers, and felt Bahorel clamp a hand upon his wrist.

"Have you come to deliver a letter," he murmured into Grantaire's ear. It was not a question. Grantaire nodded. Bahorel's face crumpled, but very quickly resumed its facade of besotted nonchalance.

"Keep it in your pocket," Bahorel instructed.

Grantaire took his hand out of his pocket, sans letter, and rested it upon the small of Bahorel's back.

"Jean, my dear fellow!" Bahorel approached the young man in the green cap, and took him by the arm. "What a pleasant surprise!"

The man in the green cap gave Bahorel a look of alarm, but smiled and clasped his hand in greeting.

"This is my good friend Léon," said Bahorel, giving Grantaire a fond and suggestive squeeze around the waist. "We've come out on a stroll, so I'm afraid I can't take the next shift. Say, why don't I bring him around for some drinks tonight, eh? At the usual spot. I'd like to introduce Léon to the rest of you handsome young devils."

Jean looked searchingly at Bahorel, who gave an almost imperceptible nod.

"Of course," Jean said with an easy smile. He held out a hand, and Grantaire gave him a limpwristed handshake.

Bahorel murmured a few more meaningful pleasantries to Jean, then said, "but we had better get home before we miss our lunch. I have ordered a kingly feast, and I'd rather it did not go cold."

Grantaire smiled in what he hoped was a besotted fashion, and permitted himself to be lead back to Bahorel's hotel by the solicitous hand upon his waist, which eventually made itself at home in one of the tail pockets of his borrowed coat.

"Well!" said Bahorel, when they were indoors again. "I had never expected you to be caught up in all this."

Grantaire shrugged helplessly. "I'm no more a Robespierrist than when you saw me last. I. A man calling himself Antoine asked me to deliver the letter, and that is all."

A shadow passed over Bahorel's usually cheerful countenance. "Were you there when—"

Grantaire studied the battered hat on Bahorel's head. "I did not see it, no," he said slowly, "but I heard the gunshot. Here."

Bahorel flinched, and Grantaire had to wait several moments before Bahorel collected himself enough to take the letter, streaked with blood and paint as it was.

Bahorel studied the stamp of the seal intently for a long minute before he broke open the letter, which seemed to be entirely in cipher. His eyes ran over the contents of the page with practiced speediness, and the mournful pall of his expression transformed into businesslike focus.

"Thank you, Grantaire," he said after a long while. He folded the letter back up and tucked it into an inner pocket. "You may not believe in the cause, but you have advanced it nonetheless."

Grantaire evaded his piercing gaze, and shrugged again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1)I'm not sure what the precise state of the Bastille elephant was in 1824, but it's not totally dilapidated yet probably? Please correct me if I'm wrong.  
> 2) if Victor Hugo doesn't want me writing contrived coincidences in my fics then he shouldn't have set a bad example with canon.


	10. 10th-11th June, 1824

Bahorel took Grantaire to the Café Musain, which, whether by serendipity or malicious coincidence, was literally a mere stone's throw away from Grantaire's lodgings.

"I hope you haven't been staking me out from here," Grantaire joked weakly as Bahorel lead him through the café proper and into a long passage that eventually opened up into a back room.

Before they entered the room, Bahorel stopped Grantaire, and said, in a low voice, "listen. They weren't involved in what happened. Try to be considerate of their feelings, alright? He was our leader, and a dear friend, and we hadn't any confirmation of what happened to him til I met you today."

A cluster of grey faced young men with bags under their eyes populated the back room. Some of them looked familiar to Grantaire, and the green caps they'd been passing around were laid upon a table. Every head swivelled in their direction, and the haggard, intent states of six young men pinned Grantaire to the spot.

The question was bursting out of them, and the oppressive silence in the room bore down with palpable weight, yet not a one of them spoke. They regarded Grantaire with a mixture of suspicious hope and terrified hostility.

"This is Grantaire," Bahorel said in introduction. He ushered Grantaire to a central seat. He did not offer the names of the others.

"Well?" One of the young men demanded at last. He was probably the youngest in the room - he couldn't have been more than seventeen or eighteen at most.

"He is dead," said Bahorel.

One of the young men crumpled, and gave a sob. All of them had the look of having received a blow they had known was coming.

"I will finish his work," said one of the young men, who was dressed head to toe in black velvet. 

"He finished his mission," Bahorel said, with a glance at Grantaire. "Grantaire confirmed it for me. He brought me a missive that he'd been carrying. It is up to others now."

"How did it happen?" another of the men addressed Grantaire directly. At least this fellow looked to be the same age as Grantaire, though he was unfortunately already balding like much older man.

Grantaire shifted uncomfortably. "I- I was painting in my studio when a blond man calling himself Antoine burst in through the window. He gave me that letter to deliver and ran off back out the way he came. The gendarmes had been on his tail, and they left a man to question me as the others chased after him. I- I heard a gunshot, and some kind of signal given via the whistles that the policemen carried, and the man questioning me told me that he was dead. I don't know any more than that."

There was a stifled sob, and someone blew his nose. Grantaire wished he had the right to cry himself.

"Thank you," said the boy that had spoken first, the youngest of them. He looked terribly weary, the way a child of seventeen never should have to look. "You have - you have made sure that his death was not in vain."

Grantaire felt Bahorel's hand tighten around his forearm, and swallowed down his reflexive cynicism. He averted his eyes and bowed his head in reply.

"It is better that we don't know all the details," said one of the young men who had been silent all this time. He said to Bahorel, "but.. rumour has it that we are running out of time. I heard two months is the very most we might have."

"It is out of our hands now," Bahorel said firmly.

One of the young men poured out a round of drinks, and raised his cup. "A toast," he said hoarsely, and his fellows picked up their own cups.

Grantaire wanted a drink very badly, but he did not want to join them in their toast. How did they really know the man was dead? Grantaire's word? His word wasn't worth anything. Grantaire didn't really believe the man was dead. He couldn't, until he saw the corpse, and that had long since been carted off somewhere. Did they bury the victims of the gendarmerie? He supposed that no one had successfully identified the man, if these compatriots of his were meeting outside of the Sainte-Pélagie. Would the body have been on display at La Morgue? It was too late to look now.

He kept his eyes averted from the solemn grief of these friends, and was relieved when Bahorel evicted him from the premises so that the coterie could discuss whatever message it was that had been in the letter. Grantaire sat at a table in the main room of the café, smoked a cigarette, drank some very tolerable coffee, and went to Floréal's rooms to finish his painting. It was not until the next morning, when he emerged rumpled and bleary eyed from a night's work, that his stomach protested at missing two days' worth of sustenance. Triumphant at finishing his stupid painting at last and defeated by the infirmity of his body, he went back to the Musain and came across Bahorel and his friends, all as sleepless as Grantaire but only half as rumpled. Harried, he nodded to them in greeting, shovelled down his eggs, and fled back to his room where he slept like the dead for sixteen hours without so much as shifting or turning in his sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) La Morgue was a place where unidentified bodies were placed on display, ostensibly for the purposes of identification. Parisians treated it like a public attraction, socialising and ogling the bodies as spectacle.
> 
> The green caps...were for my fellow CN Les Mis stans. 其实我就是故意给他们集体戴绿帽子。嘿嘿嘿。。。。。。

**Author's Note:**

> My Tumblr is [@symbieote](http://symbieote.tumblr.com), and I'm always open to yelling about Les mis!


End file.
